Millions of people around the world use electronic financial management systems to help manage their finances. Such financial management systems gather data related to financial transactions of the users. The users can monitor many of their financial accounts and other financial matters from a single financial management system. Such financial management systems can help users save time by eliminating the need to check several different financial accounts in order to manage their finances. However, many users can still encounter difficulties when using traditional financial management systems.
For instance, financial management systems occasionally erroneously swap data collection feeds for multiple financial accounts. For example, a bank may change the HTML order of user accounts in the user's banking portal webpage. While in the past the checking account appeared before the savings account in the list of users accounts, after an update to the bank's website the savings account will appear first and the checking account will appear second. In such a case the financial system is likely to import the transactions from the savings account into the checking account and vice versa.
These failures can have tremendous adverse impact on users. Users may make financial decisions based on erroneous data presented to them by their financial management system. A user may make purchases believing she has more money in her checking account than she truly has. A user may buy or sell stocks based on faulty information. This can potentially ruin a user's financial situation and have life-long consequences. Not only does this adversely affect the users, but to assist users with these situations financial management systems may need to devote large amount of human and computer resources to resolving these issues. Additionally, users may feel that their financial management system did them more harm than good and may decide to abandon the financial management system.
What is needed is a method and system that detects and corrects accounts swaps in a financial system.